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In the previous blog post, I covered the newly introduced Drobo S and Drobo Elite storage systems, they are new product offerings from Data Robotics, you can read about them here.

Today we will jump into installing and configuring a new Drobo.

So after writing this post in its entirety, I decided to change the title of it. Though we will walk through an install of the Drobo during this post, it uncovers the details on writable / usable storage based on what you insert and the amount of overhead it creates with using the BeyondRaid technology.

Here is a video, created while unpacking, installing and configuring the Drobo, you may probably like the sound track of the video.

Song: Jai Ho (Movie: Slumdog Millionaire)

As for the installation and setup, here are some important things to look forward to..

I have to honestly say, this configuration exercise was a piece of cake, but we have uncovered some details around usable space with the Drobo. With the installation of Drobo you do not need to be a storage expert neither a person with a technical background and that makes it a big selling point in the home / SMB space.

For this blog post, I have used the MAC OSX 10.6.2 installation along with HFS+ file system. But a windows installation with FAT32 file system will be on similar lines.

Insert the CD in the CD Rom Drive….let the magic begin…

Welcome Screen..

Accept the licensing agreement and click on Continue, to install the Drobo dashboard..

During the installation you will be prompted to register your Drobo with Data Robotics. You can skip this step and register later. If you decide to register now, you will need your name, address, phone, Drobo serial number (found at the bottom of the unit) and some other additional information..

If you have any Drobo’s connected to the computer where you are installing the Dashboard, please disconnect them at this point..

It will take about couple of minutes to install the necessary files on Mac OSX or Windows..

Reconnect the Drobo to the computer. Drives can be installed or uninstalled within the Drobo at this point. .

As seen in the picture, we have connected the Drobo with no drives in it. Drobo Volume shows 0 TB usable..

Drobo showing no drives present in any slots. .

Insert 1 x 1TB drive in the Drobo, alerts showing the Drobo will not be able to protect the drive until another drive is inserted. You can only obtain data protection through atleast 2 drives in the Drobo. .

Insert 1TB drive with 32MB cache drive in Slot 0, Insert 500 GB with 16MB cache drive in slot 1. Two drives have same speed but different onboard cache and drive sizes...

Note: The beauty of the Drobo is it can accept drives with multiple speeds, sizes and cache on board to create a Drobo thin provisioned volume.

Going through Data Protection process now. It may take about 24 mins for a 1TB drive and a 500GB drive to creat the necessary data protection. During this data protection build, the drives and data on the Drobo is not protected from failures (in short your data will stay intact if no additional drives fail during the data protection build)..

After about 21 mins of wait, the data is finally protected. .

As you can see we have 449GB of available space to create volumes, there are no volumes created so far. Creating volumes in a Drobo world means installing a file system on the volume and making it available to the attached host. Volumes can be bigger than the actual drive sizes installed in the system. Standard Volume sizes offered within the Drobo are 2TB, 4TB, 8TB and 16TB. With 16TB, is possibly only supported with Drobo Pro and not with a Drobo. .

On the Tools tab, lets setup some values..

“Blink Lights” will start flashing lights on the front of the Drobo, “Standby” will put the Drobo in Standby mode for maintenance or possibly to turn it off if not needed. “Format” allows you for format the Drobo in HFS+ or FAT32 formats. “Reset” will reset your Drobo to factory setting. “Rename the Drobo and Volumes” will rename your Drobo and the volume names.

Drobo will send alerts based on your selection. I like to leave the option on for “when a situation is important” send me an email. This option will only work when an actual computer is connected to the Drobo. If you plan to leave your Drobo unconnected for longer duration of times, you may not get an notifications for failed drives or components.

Register your Drobo if you haven’t so far, Check for updates for the Drobo dashboard and Drobo firmware.

Format Volume, Here we are creating a 4TB volume, even though the drives we are inserting in the Drobo do not add up to total 4 TB’s right now. We are creating a max volume size at this point based on what we think we may use within this Drobo (Again remember the concept of the Drobo is to expand your storage on the fly). That means if the Drobo was running at full capacity, we would be able to use 4TB of storage with 4 x 1TB drives. Create a volume name, hit continue and wait for about 5 mins for volume format.

One obvious disadvantage of the Drobo I see is, the drive writable size with two drives is still limited to the smallest drive in place. With a 1TB drive and a 500GB drive, we have a usable space of 455 GBs. With additional two drives we install, the limitation of the smallest drive will be ignored. Again remember our total max volume size is 4TB, so your host see 4TB of storage but can only save uptoo 455 GB of storage on the disk unless you are able to add other disk in the Drobo.

Lets see by adding other drives if things change.

Lets add a 640GB drive into the mix now. I suspect the total usable storage will now be close to 1.0 TB and not 1.1TB. Lets see….

.

Another drive inserted alert .

It now seems we have 1.02 TB of usable data. .

Added a new 1TB drive in the system, lets see what results we get with this new drive. .

1.93GB of data is now usable..

Total inserted storage in our case is 3.14 TB, total usable storage is 1.93TB, Total volume size is 4TB, giving us 61% usable storage ration to our inserted storage. About 941 GB of data is used for protection, or call it parity or call is some bit that is used to recover the data.

With traditional RAID 5 (3+1), you will have around 25% overhead.

With traditional RAID 6 (6+2), you will have around 25% overhead.

With Drobo (4) drives, we have around 39% overhead, the cost of BeyondRAID technology.

Volume size of 4TB that we created in this case cannot be changed without a reformat of the drives. So select the write volume size from the get go.

End result is at least 39% overhead, If you look at it, its kinda high….

Need to test Drobo with 4 x 1 TB drives to see what is the usable storage…i suspect even though you have created a 4TB volume, it is not 4TB usable space.

The DROBO offers easy installation, easy setup, easy configuration, easy use and data in place upgrades if well planned..

Stay tuned for a deep dive session on how the Drobo works internally….Note: Will update the post around 11:00 Am tomorrow with my finding on overhead with 2 x 1TB drives in the system. So 4TB volume configured, 2 x 1 TB inserted, how much is the usable / writable storage based on those stats. Please comment if you figure out before I update. I suspect it to be around 610GB – 650GB’s total?

Oh….the 2 x 1 TB drives produced a completely different result….920GB usable, so here we only have about 8% overhead. This does mean, that even though the Drobo is marketed as a device that accepts drives of multiple sizes, there is an additional overhead with putting drives of multiple sizes in there.Here is the test result….

Another test revealed with 4 x 2TB drives in the system, the end user was able to obtain about 5.5TB of usable storage, that is about 68% usable space or 32% overhead.

One rule of thumb I get out of this exercise, what ever you do, try to keep the drive sizes common between all the drives you use within the Drobo for maximum usable storage or less overhead.

Edited 11/24.2009 at 6:00 PM.

Some additional test results with the Drobo

If you plug in 4 x 1TB drive you get 2.7TB of usable space that is 32.5% Overhead (protection and reserved space).

If you plug in 2 x 1TB drive you get 920 GB, that is 54% overhead (protection and reserved space). And again, I am not recommending you use this scenario, using less than 4 drives or different drive sizes causes added penalties.

If you were replacing one drive out of the set of 4 x 1TB drive with a 2TB drive, so 1 x 2TB and 3 x 1 TB, no additional storage space is available.

If you had 4 x 2TB drives and just replaced two of those 2TB drives with 2 x 500GB drives, your usable storage falls from 5.5TB to 2.7TB 46% overhead.

May be I am looking at this the completely wrong way, but the marketing buzz word around use the drives you have, mix and match drive types and sizes, may not give you an optimal solution. Though if you plan to really keep the drive sizes similar across the Drobo, it may be for you….

Comments always welcome, please feel free to correct if you see this differently….

As most of you know, DROBO has been in the market for the past couple of years. There are three primary units that Data Robotics has in the industry today. The DROBO – 4 Drive Unit, DROBO Pro – 8 Drive Unit and DROBO Share that enables you to connect two DROBO’s and run community designed applications.

As of 11/23/2009, there are two new DROBO devices being introduced, the DROBO S and DROBO ElIte.

Both these DROBO’s will compete in the similar market space of its predecessors, but has additional features compared to the DROBO and DROBO Pro devices.

The big marketing buzz Data Robotics uses with it products today is “Set it, Forget it”. Data Robotics has designed a technology called BeyondRAID that in essence is a self-healing storage solution. The market space that DROBO and DROBO Pro’s compete today is the home and SMB space.

I was writing a blog post on Storage Economics last night for ITKE (IT Knowledge Exchange). During some thought process and writing, I got confused on a sentence I was trying to format. The confusion was between ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) and Storage Tiering. Though I think both the concepts are overlapping, most of the responses I got from twitter were Storage Tiering is a revamped ILM or ILM with lipstick. Twitter search: “ILM, Tiering”.

After thinking about this for the past 24 hours, I am still not sure if I am at the right conclusion.

What is ILM (Information Lifecycle Management):

A process to manage information through out its lifecycle from creation to deletion. Lets look at ILM from a storage perspective.

1) A user or an application creates data and possibly over time that data is modified.
2) The data needs to be stored and possibly be protected through RAID, snaps, clones, replication and backups.
3) The data now needs to be archived as it gets old, and retention policies & laws kick in.
4) The data needs to be search-able and retrievable NOW.
5) Finally the data needs to be deleted.

Though some argue protection (RAID, snaps, clones, replication, backups) are part of ILP: Information Lifecycle Protection and not ILM: Information Lifecycle Management.

A defined pool of Storage within a storage environment that is classified based on either speed, availability, protection levels, access times, SLA’s, frequency of use and possibly cost.

The higher the Storage Tier 0, 1, 2, the higher the cost of management, purchase, availability, speed, protection levels, frequency of use and least access times and outages. The lower the Storage Tier 3, 4, 5, the lower the cost of management, purchase, availability, speed, protection levels, frequency of use and higher access times.

As data gets old or unused, based on workflow, the data moves from higher tiers to lower tiers, could be an automated move, a manual move, a business rules defined move or a policies based move.

Data Protection, Tiering, Archiving, Backup, Retention, Search are all components of Storage Tiering these days. So does this mean, Storage Tiering is merely a subset of ILM.

The Overlap:

I have not heard the word ILM from large vendors in any tech-talk, on any blogs, nor any podcasts these days. So where is ILM or have the vendors given up on the concept of ILM. Is Storage Tiering the new ILM, if that is the case what is the difference.

ILM does include two major components which are data creation and data deletion, but storage tiering does not encompass those, it only preaches moving the data to a lower or higher tier based on availability, backup, archive, retention, search and retrieve features.

So is ILM still alive and if it is, where is it. If it is dead, does it mean we do not have workflows and automation around the other aspects of ILM not included in Storage Tiering. Is Storage Tiering just a marketing buzz and is still uses the underlying concept of ILM.

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The opinions expressed here are my - StorageNerve opinions. This blog and the content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer (Accenture) or clients and does not reflect their views and opinions.